What ethical problems realistically arise in programming?

Posted by Fishtoaster on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Fishtoaster
Published on 2010-09-17T00:16:50Z Indexed on 2011/01/06 22:59 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 263

Filed under:
|

When I co-oped during college, I had to fill out an evaluation of the co-op afterwards. One metric I always had to rate was how much the company required me to "Make ethical decisions related to your profession."

This always seemed kinda silly- I mean, my first co-op was writing java apps to manage industrial radios. There wasn't much moral ambiguity going on.

Anyway, I'm wonder what sort of ethical dilemmas one might actually encounter in software development.

Edit:

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. - Nathanial Borenstein

© Programmers or respective owner

Related posts about job

Related posts about ethics